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Crowdsourcing: A Definition

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.

October 24, 2006

This weekend the Christian Science Monitor took an interesting look at group-authoring projects and the software that facilitates them. The article looks at a couple different approaches to what you might call crowdauthoring (which comprises a subset of what are being called "Networked Books;" I'll parse the terminology some other time). The piece examines straight-up, Wiki-style collaborative efforts such as the project mentioned in my previous post, as well as a more considered method being explored by McKenzie Wark, in which readers are invited to contribute comments to his book Gam3r 7h3ory while he's in the process of writing it, then alter the actual text as much as they like once it's been published. I think this hyrbid model is really smart. As I've previously noted, I'm skeptical about laissez faire crowdauthoring, as it entirely jettisons an ultimate authority, which is kind of like a kitchen without a chef. As CSM reports, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has similar concerns, and has recently launched Citizendium, his own hybridized model of a wiki reference work, which will be authored by the crowd, yes, but edited by experts.

Any way you cut it, this is an exciting moment in book publishing: We're witnessing the birth of a new medium. I found this quote from the CSM article is provocative in this regard: "The book is now a place, as much as a thing that
somebody reads," says Paula Berinstein, author of an upcoming article
on the trend in Searcher, a magazine for database professionals. "It's a place where the author is more the host, or the maitre d' in a fancy New York restaurant," she says. A great example of this, not mentioned in the CSM piece, is Richard Frenay's project, Pulse.

October 19, 2006

Another Book-by-Wiki: Sometime next year Pearson Education will publish a collectively authored book, We Are Smarter Than Me. This easily qualifies as the most ambitious entry into the crowdwriting arena. The eponymous organization behind the book is inviting 2 million people from several prestigious institutions to contribute (675,000 invitees from Wharton alone, which presumably constitutes everyone who's ever enrolled in a class there), and will be using the "latest technologies" to make every aspect of the process transparent and collaborative, landing WASTM in that sweet spot where the Venn circles of crowdsourcing and peer production overlap. I find their optimism admirable, and hope it's not misplaced. Other crowd-authoring attempts rely on some higher authority to select the best bits for popular delectation. As I read it, the We Are Smarter Than Me founders expect the crowd alone to perform that role. Granted, this happens to be a pretty rarefied crowd, but then, the smarter the cats, the harder they are to herd. Thomas Malone, an MIT management prof and one of the organizers of the project says that "No matter what it's going to be interesting." I couldn't agree more. My only question: If all the content's being authored by the crowd, will someone please edit that title?

October 18, 2006

Digg this: A really impressive lightbox photography show at the Atlantic Ave. Subway Station in Brooklyn. The curator discovered the artist – the game developer and photographer Ranjit Bhatnagar – by searching Flickr. That represents a significant departure from curation-as-usual, which generally involves selecting known quantities from a pool of established artists. (I spent a year curating for a New York gallery in the '90s.) Call it disintermediation, or call it luck (as do the folks at Flickr blog); I'll call it crowdsourcing, and a sign of things to come. Tip of my hat to the ever-resourceful Sharon McIntyre for sending me the story.

October 17, 2006

Long before she ascended to the throne of England Elizabeth Tudor had become fluent in French, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Latin. Too bad she's no longer with us, as bloggers have written about crowdsourcing in every one of those languages except Latin (the "crowdsouring for fun and profit" juggernaut having failed to penetrate the Vatican). Unfortunately, I speak none of these. (Perhaps it was the lack of royal tutors.) Given the volume of foreign-language postings, there's a lot of interesting stuff that isn't being tracked in the U.S. As such, I'm looking for volunteers who might be willing to file the occasional digest of (legitimate and interesting) crowdsourcing developments overseas. I've already got a Francophone lined up for the job, but the Spanish-, German- and Japanese-speaking slots remain open. Contact me for details.

The Crowd as Professional Tourist: Truth be told, there wasn't supposed to be a fifth installment in this series, but today I read this article from the Japanese English newspaper, the Daily Yomiuri. Headlined "Crowdsourcing Starts to Crowd Out Professionals," the piece is essentially a profile of Lee Foster, a professional travel writer and photographer with nine books to his credit. Recently Foster has been forced to charge less for his photos. And the situation, for Foster and other travel photographers, is bound to get worse. "'Maybe next year I'll get all of my photos at 3 dollars per photo from iStockphoto,'" one of Foster's primary clients told him.

This interests me on a few levels: First it provides additional evidence of downward price pressure in stock photography. But the piece also features the ways Foster is changing his business model to accomodate for crowdsourcing's affects on travel journalism. For one, he's started running AdSense on his site ("As long as I can attract the consumer directly, I don't need to publish in conventional media to produce income," says Foster). Secondly, and this is a more intriguing gambit, Foster is going vertical. Recognizing that the greatest challenge in crowdsourcing is filtering wheat from chaff, he's creating new services on his site that make it easier for publishers to find specialized content. Smart.

Finally, there are a lot of entrepreneurs betting on crowdsourcing as the next big thing in journalism. I'm skeptical: In general I think old media and new media can, and will, get along just fine. I'm not nearly as optimistic about the future of travel books and magazines. While premier publications like Condé Nast Traveler will continue to flourish, I predict that projects like Wikitravel will pose a serious threat to less specialized publications.

October 16, 2006

• Crowd as Artists: This Wednesday the curator Andrea Grover will unveil an art show she put together entitled,"Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing." The exhibition is hosted at the New York City gallery Apex Art.
Inspired in part by my Wired article, Grover has gathered an eclectic
group of art makers that includes some of my favorite creative minds
working today, from Davy Rothbart of Found Magazine (which has been tapping the crowd for mesmerizing content since 2001) to the performance artist/director/writer Miranda July (who will show works from the collaborative Web site she operates with Harrell Fletcher, LearningtoLoveYouMore.com). On November 15th at 6:30 PM I'll give a talk on crowdsourcing at the gallery. If you're in New York at that time, I'd love to see you.

October 15, 2006

• Crowd, MD: I've been predicting the emergence of crowdsourcing in
the professions – namely law and medicine – for months. Earlier this
month a couple Boom 1.0 veterans from Promotions.com launched
OrganizedWisdom.com, which aims to provide, in its own words, "a
collaborative health information community, combining professional
and user-generated health content with social networking technologies
to help people make the most informed health decisions possible." The
site has been met with some healthy skepticism, but at least a few health care bloggers
have adopted a wait-and-see attitude. CEO Unity Stoakes is quick to
caution that it will take time to for OrganizedWisdom to generate
enough user experiences to achieve its intended affect. He also points
out, in an interesting interview
with The Health Care IT Guy, that this form of community knowledge
gathering is nothing new in the health care industry. All the more
reason, by my lights, that we're sure to see more companies like
OrganizedWisdom tapping the crowd for medical information in the future. What I want to know is who's working on a crowdsourcing app for legal advice.

October 14, 2006

• Crowd as Author: The folks at Lifebushido have just published a collectively authored book, entitled Why Are You Here Right Now? The book includes 1,000 answers to just that question, all submitted via Mechanical Turk. This is somewhat reminiscent of The Sheep Market,
which also capitalized on teh eagerness of Turkers to do anything for a fistful of pennies. The jury is still out on whether consumers find this kind of
group authorship to be compelling content. The Swedish consulting firm Interesting.org
– which uses a community of 30,000 to generate ideas for their clients
– recently published a book authored by 50 of their members, with another collaborative book in the works. Teo Hausen at interesting.org tells me it's sold well. It's only available in Sweden, so I have no idea of confirming this. Finally, in 2007 the artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher will publish a book featuring works contributed to their Web site Learningtoloveyoumore.com.

Some will point out that these are essentially just anthologies – hardly an experimental genre of literature. True enough, but I think there's something more interesting at play in the broadly participatory nature of these projects, which strive to represent the crowd in its very diversity, as opposed to representing a spcialized attribute through a select group of authors. At any rate all three books signify a new approach to the oldest medium and I'll be anxious to see how they fare.

October 13, 2006

Crowdsourcing has gained velocity in both the breadth and quantity
of its applications. I generally don't attempt to record all (or even
most) of these, but I was so struck by the diversity of
crowdsourcing efforts come to light over the last few days that I
thought I'd try to round them up for the purpose of emphasizing the model's usefulness across a range of disciplines. I find this diversification greatly encouraging, both because it serves as testimony to the unbounded imagination out there, and because it
supports my original supposition that crowdsourcing is a phenomenon
notable for its flexibility, capable of being used to generate scientific solutions as easily as, say, monetizing user-generated video. To this end I'm launching a series of posts that will start today and run daily through next week.

• Crowd as Jury: Floyd Landis, the disgraced American bicyclist and
winner, for a day, of the 2006 Tour de France, has posted to his Web site all the documents relating to his ongoing attempt to clear his name. Some
call this crowdsourcing; I'm a little more skeptical. This falls just
outside my definition of the term, which involves a person, company or
institution deriving value from the crowd's ability to perform some
specific task. This isn't the case here: Landis is not, for instance,
posting his test results to the scientific community at large in the
hope that further analysis will contradict the Anti-Doping Review
Board, which recommended
sanctions against Landis. But Landis is crowdsourcing a less tangible
function: the public's capacity to pardon, from time to time,
celebrities that higher authorities have already condemned.
Historically such appeals have been made through mediators like
newspaper columnists and talk show hosts that shape public opinion.
Landis is taking the evidence straight to the crowd. It's a novel
approach, whatever the ultimate verdict.

October 06, 2006

Last Sunday Dennis Ryerson, the editor-in-chief of the Indianapolis Star, wrote an editor's note announcing a change in the paper's policy. Crowdsourcing, he wrote, is a term with which his readers may be unfamiliar. His newsroom wasn't too familiar with it either. Nevertheless, "it's a concept we will be using more and more as we work harder to involve our
readers in the preparation of our news reports, in print and online." With more papers feeling open to experimentation in the wake of falling revenues and scary business forecasts, I see this as a sign of things to come. Read the whole editorial here. Thanks to Jeff Jarvis, who points to the note on his blog Buzzmachine.